I left my heart in Anjalakoski

I'm in love with Finland. It's hard to know where to start in terms of describing the place and all I loved about it, so I'll say this: having spent this past week there, I understand the desire to be rich. I would like to be rich and spend May, June, and July on an island in the Finnish archipelago close to Turku. I would sit in the sun for 22 hours a day, I would live in an outdoor hammock occasionally cursing the rain, chill, and mosquitoes, and I would never be sad again, because after those months were over I would follow the sunshine somewhere else.

It was a press tour so we drank and didn't sleep much, having to leave each town or area early each morning to go to the next facility. That was rendered easy by that sun, that perpetual sun . . . anti-drugs campaigners don't have much pull with me because they're never honest about the great things involved in smoking reefer, like fantastic sex and television being so much more interesting. In the same vein, all that struggling and neat-o sunlamp marketing at the SAD crowd always fails to mention that the other side of the coin is the fucking Scandinavian summer. I have slept about ten hours in the last seven days, had my tits bored off by what felt like hundreds of PowerPoint presentations and hours of conversation with men who were incapable of mentally handling any subject outside of their own mighty prowess as human beings, and drank roughly 10 times more than I drink in the course of a normal week. Yet I feel monumentally refreshed.

And it was beautiful, and the people were so kind, and their grim, unsmiling humour so bloody appealing. I have anecdotes about the random kindness from absolute strangers there that rival and surpass any anecdotes of mammoth stupidity and incompetent bad intentions here. I know I've got the rose-coloured glasses on: I needed a change of air, a break, and I got it over a sunny week courtesy of a flourishing industrial company that was happy to spend thousands and thousands of euros to impress me - and oh yes, I'm fully aware that being made to feel awfully important and clever by the organizers might have something to do with my brimming goodwill towards the place. Doesn't matter. I love the pants off it.

Also doesn't hurt that the food was fucking marvellous. They eat salmon the way Americans eat pork, except salmon is probably cheaper there than pork is anywhere. And so many wild mushrooms; it was morel season - and then the sturgeon, the fish eggs, the piles and piles of fresh lake perch - and then the berries - the strawberries, currants, blueberries, the sea buckthorn . . . Frankly, I'm pissed off to be back.